Art in the Time of Cholera

Collage by Mary M Payne, 26cmx38cm ( Sold)

 Just before the lockdown went into effect on March 17, 2021, I was attending an art class once a week.  In that class, the teacher would present a theme for us to complete in about a month's time.  Along the way, we attended class for advice and to show our progress. 

Today I am taking some time to get back to my blog and show you some work I produced before the class went onto Skype and I decided to quit the art school. 

The theme this time was to depict the idea of "infinitely large or infinitely small".  Since I wasn't inclined to take the suggestion literally as some museum installation artists have done, I decided to use the idea of the cosmos asa point of reference for what was infinitely large and "talk" about our place in the universe.

I decided to try "surrealist" collage as a starting point.  

First I assembled a large assortment of images that appealed to me.  I found some on a calendar but most were free stock online images.  The quality of the image was paramount so I took the trouble to pay for laser images from a shop in town.  

For the paper, I tried different weights and textures. I first tried photo paper but it was to heavy and even the "mat" photo paper had a shiny aspect that I didn't want.   In fact with all this experimentation and HP cartridges costing about 25 euros apiece, this is probably my most expensive project so far.

As an adhesive I used ordinary school quality white paste to adhere print paper to 180 gram Canson and as a support I used 300 gram water color Canson paper throughout.

When the layers became too thick I used double faced tape, the strongest I could find. 

In each case in the series of 6...26cmx38cm...I used the image of the human hand as a thread of cohesion.

In this first collage I found the diver about to execute a back flip and I liked it enough to put it in.  Later I realized that for me, she represents us as humans, blind to where we are going.  

We take our good fortune, our health, our lives, our planet as given. We frolic through our lives often ignoring consequences of our thoughts and actions.   So then I realized I had a theme, my own theme,  in addition to the theme given by the instructor.